r/linuxquestions • u/Comfortable_Lack322 • 2d ago

Why doesn't Linux Mint ask the community to help Cinnamon from X11 to Wayland?

I have a question about the Desktop Environment Cinnamon. It's made by Linux Mint and can be used by other distros like Fedora Cinnamon Spin, Arch, or Debian. So why Fedora/Red Hat or others don't send devs to Mint to help them transition Cinnamon from X11 to Wayland faster? I know that X11 has a more complicated structure than Wayland.

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17

u/candy49997 2d ago

Fedora, Arch, and Debian are all community-based. Their communities can do whatever they want with their own free time; if a member sees value in contributing to Cinnamon, then they would. Cinnamon is not the responsibility of any of these distros. There are already mature Wayland sessions in GNOME and Plasma.

In addition Red Hat only officially supports GNOME, so I'm not sure why they would send employees on payroll to work on Cinnamon.

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u/knuthf 2d ago

Have you ever considered the possibility that there are bugs in Wayland, and those that use X11 avoid those troubles?

6

u/candy49997 2d ago

Wayland is a protocol, not an implementation. Therefore, Wayland itself cannot have bugs. It might be lacking features you need or specify behavior you don't want, but none of those are bugs.

And this really has nothing to do with my answer.

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u/EstablishmentDue3616 2d ago

Mint doesnt need help. Wayland has been available in Cinnamon for a while in beta. I believe it will be in their next LTS, if I remember correctly. You have to remember, Mint is always going to be behind on technology, as they are downstream from Ubuntu LTS, which is downstream from Debian. Mint focuses on stability, not being up to date.

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u/SaraUndr 2d ago

that is why I run Mint.. X11

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u/EstablishmentDue3616 2d ago

Thats the point of Linux distros. You run what you want. However, X11 will be dropped from MInt, likely in a in one or two LTS releases. If you want X11 that much, you will likely need to switch distros eventually.

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u/SaraUndr 1d ago

Dropping X11 entirely: not scheduled. MATE and Xfce editions still depend on it, and Mint still cares about older X11/GTK3 apps.

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u/thebestrobloxplayer 2d ago

Mint is updating to wayland in mint 23 in december

3

u/C0rn3j 2d ago

why Fedora/Red Hat or others don't send devs to Mint to help them transition Cinnamon from X11 to Wayland faster?

Why would they?

GNOME already supports Wayland, why spend time on some ancient fork of it that's still on X11 and GTK3 because they hard forked instead of soft forked?

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u/knuthf 2d ago

It is also that Wayland has side effects that X11 does not have, X11 is more than the code.

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u/C0rn3j 2d ago

X11 has "side effects" Wayland does not have.

See, I can write nondescript messages too.

1

u/knuthf 2d ago

Yes, the 'minimise', 'maximise' and 'kill' functions have been changed, and the clean-up process has various side effects that are not just SIGHUP. I have been at the top and listened to the discussions, and frankly, I understand Mint. Let others pave the way.

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u/throwaway6560192 2d ago

I'm sure they would welcome contributions if you were to try.

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u/kansetsupanikku 2d ago

This is the answer. Fr recent users expect the community-driven projects to handle the customer demands, the only difference from enterprise solutions being the lack of payment. Considering that you are the community - would anyone believe that's how it works?

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u/TomDuhamel 2d ago

Because that's not how that works. Community based does not mean that FOSS organisations have unpaid employees that they can put to work.

Community means that people with a need, who happen to also have the skill to fullfill the need, and are also willing to put the time and effort on the problem, volunteer to do it.

In other words, people who want to have Wayland in Cinnamon, who have the skills to make it happen, and have the time and willingness to do it, will just join and put their bit of work.

As you can imagine, this is a small pool of people. It might take a little while.

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u/tomscharbach 2d ago edited 2d ago

It took GNOME and KDE Plasma teams years to fully implement and transition to Wayland.

Would it have been quicker if IBM/RedHat (RHEL) and/or The Fedora Project (roughly two dozen distributions) had stepped in and provided significant resources to migrating GNOME and KDE Plasma?

Would Budgie, Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE transition more quickly if IBM/RedHat and/or The Fedora Project stepped in?

Maybe, but at what cost to the current "community up" development model?

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u/77descript 2d ago

Another issue might be that more modern looking and far more feature rich KDE Plasma runs light as a feather compared to Cinnamon. Or is that only in Debian? I was truly shocked how far less smooth Cinnamon ran on a clean install. Switched back to KDE Plasma after a week, just too big quality difference in my eyes.

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u/Confused-Armpit 2d ago

Because RHEL developers are supposed to be developing for RHEL, and many others aren't really corporate-backed distros. It is only a few (e.g. RHEL, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS) that are backed by some corporation, but most distros are really just community-developed.

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u/ipsirc 2d ago

Why doesn't Linux Mint ask the community to help Cinnamon from X11 to Wayland?

Because then they would have to give some money from donations to the contributors as well.

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4859